Entry Details

About the Entry

Category: 
All Content > Feature Article > Association > Northeast

Title of entry: 
Vera Rubin Observatory

Issue or Publication date:
June 23, 2025

Publication name: 
IEEE Spectrum

View Website home page:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/

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Entry Essay: 
IEEE Spectrum is the flagship magazine and website of the IEEE, the world’s largest professional organization for engineers and technologists. Spectrum’s print edition is sent monthly to the IEEE’s 500,000 members. The website posts a daily mix of news, features, commentary, and multimedia, attracting about 1 million visitors a month. Our mission: to keep people informed about major developments in technology, engineering, and science. Our readers want complex concepts explained in plain, jargon-free language, with details they can’t get elsewhere. They count on Spectrum for thoughtful discussion of technology’s social impacts as well as expert analysis of trends and cutting-edge research.
The story of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory has been 30 years in the making. It’s a telescope unlike any other, designed to explore the entire southern hemisphere sky over the next decade to help astronomers understand how our universe changes over time. To bring this story to our readers with the level of nuanced storytelling and deep technical detail that they expect, we worked with the Rubin team and Italian photographer Enrico Sacchetti for more than a year to secure unprecedented access to the observatory in Chile days before its completion.
The four days and three nights that senior editor Evan Ackerman spent on the 9,000 foot summit of Cerro Pachón enabled him to go well beyond guided tours and structured interviews, getting to know the people making everything happen as they prepared the telescope for its moment of “first photon.” With testing of the telescope starting just after sunset and troubleshooting beginning at sunrise, he found some of the most interesting parts of the story in the margins of his reporting, as he spent time with the commissioning scientists and engineers. He watched through bleary, blood-shot eyes as the team powered through sleepless nights (and days) full of exhaustion, frustration, excitement, and elation. His story puts the reader in the midst of that remarkable time, with vivid prose and telling detail.
Spectrum is known for its accessible yet in-depth approach to engineering stories. But what made a story like this one a particular joy to report and write, says Ackerman, “was the chance to be a very small part of something extraordinary. It has been a privilege to share that joy with our readers through this story.”